Work Text:
Dragonspine is how children of Mondstadt first learn about fear.
The tale is always told in urgent, dramatic whispers: children of the snow, starved for warmth, hiding in the shadows and biding their time for the moment their icy fingers can hold on to you and never let go, dragging you down to the lightless cave where they reside. In the morning they will be the one wearing your face.
There are other tales, too, of child-eating dragon who would snatch those who wander too far from their home; of mutated monsters who would tear naughty children limb by limb. Tales told by exasperated parents and guardians to keep their children from straying too far from the city walls, echoed in the playgrounds by children whose minds conjure an amalgamation of all their childish horrors.
Even now Diluc remembers the chill of that fear, the shadows haunting his dreams when winter came. He remembers his childish bravado as he held Kaeya's hands and promised to protect him from that horrible cold, because that is what a big brother is supposed to do, isn't it? To protect the ones he loves, to keep them away from harm? His Vision, hanging proudly on his belt, would gleam as he did so, as if in proud agreement: even the eternal cold of the mountain could not stand a chance against Diluc's flame.
How different this day would have turned out, if such naïve conviction alone had been enough—if he had been enough. If he had fought a little harder, if he had arrived a little sooner, then surely Kaeya wouldn't—
"S-stop blaming yourself, D-Diluc."
Diluc does stop, then. Not because of the words, but because of the way Kaeya said them: through sharply chattering teeth, his voice thin and brittle as a layer of ice forming over a lake on the first day of winter.
"Don't talk," Diluc chides, his tone caustic. "The storm should let up soon, and then it should be safe for us to—"
Kaeya's laughter cuts him off, the sound of it echoing through the icy-blue cavern they are in. Diluc has never heard him laugh like that, before, the hysteria tinging its edges made jagged by Kaeya's breathlessness. "You should have just let me drown."
The kindling in Diluc's hand snaps in two.
"Did you not hear me the first time? Don't talk," he says, sharper still. He is angry, he tells himself—angry at his own helplessness, but also at Kaeya, too, for his recklessness. For going up the mountain alone, knowing full well how unkind Dragonspine is to those with his Vision. For the way Kaeya is looking at him, his gaze heavy with something almost mournful, as if he is regretting the fact that Diluc saved him from being swallowed whole by the unforgiving coldness of the mountain's icy lake.
It is easier for him to think of this storm raging inside him at the sight of Kaeya's pale lips and the way he curls into himself as yet another form of anger, because he knows anger. He knows how it feels as it courses through his veins; he knows how to channel its flame into his own. Anger is his steadfast companion, straightforward and uncomplicated—unlike fear, unlike worry.
Unlike Kaeya himself, whose lone eye is made brighter by the chill that Diluc knows is slowly but surely seizing him from the inside out, in spite of Diluc's best efforts. His coat, draped around Kaeya's shaking shoulders, is not enough; the fire burning in front of them is not enough. Nothing Diluc can do, here in this cave barely big enough to fit both of them, would be enough—what Kaeya needs is a healer, someone who knows how to use their hands for arts other than violence, someone who is not Diluc.
What Diluc needs is for Kaeya to stop talking.
"You could h-have made it back to the foot of the mountain before the snowstorm hit, if it wasn't for m-me," Kaeya starts again, his voice cracking. "I'm sorry."
Kaeya's too-bright eye is trained at Diluc's face, but the way his pupil dilates tell Diluc that he isn't looking at him. He isn't looking at anything at all.
"Don't—" Diluc swallows, his hands balled tightly into fists. "Don't apologize. We can talk about this later, so—"
"Ah," Kaeya chuckles. "What if—what if there is no later?"
He sounds almost lucid, his words spoken with a candor that Diluc hasn't seen in so long—not after that night, when Kaeya wielded his truth like a weapon and Diluc had retaliated in turn. But there is nothing sharp about Kaeya's honesty, this time—the cold has blurred its edges, turned it soft as freshly fallen snow.
"I have always wanted to apologize to you," Kaeya says. His pale lips seem frozen in the curve of a small smile. "I'm sorry, Luc—for everything."
It is that childhood nickname that breaks him, in the end.
"You have nothing to apologize for," Diluc says around the lump lodged in his throat. "I just need you to hold on a little longer, okay?"
Kaeya shakes his head—or tries to, anyway, the movement stilted and spasmodic. "No no no, I need you to listen to me, Luc—" his words are starting to slur together, his eye glazed and unseeing. "I'm sorry I lied. I'm sorry I told you the truth."
"Kaeya," Diluc hates the shakiness in his voice, the way the name seems to crumble in his mouth. "You don't have to—"
Kaeya's smile widens at that; his eye softens. It is a smile from their childhood, the one that always managed to turn Diluc's heartbeats into the erratic fluttering of a crystalfly's wings—he used to think he would do anything, just to see that smile. Just to have Kaeya look at him as if they are the only two people in the world. But the cold inside Kaeya has turned the smile into a bloodless phantom of its usual warmth, Kaeya's curved lips so pale they look blue.
He reaches out, then, pressing his gloved thumb against Kaeya's lips as if that gesture alone could bring life back to them. Kaeya's eyelid flutters sluggishly as he tries to lean against the warmth of Diluc's hand, blindly reaching out to weakly clutch at the sleeve of his shirt.
"I'm sorry, Luc," Kaeya repeats, almost soundlessly. Outside, the wind has stopped howling—all at once, the world is silent and still. "I'm sorry I loved you. I'm sorry I still do."
Something shatters inside Diluc. Its shards lodge themselves in his throat, in the space between his lungs; his heart stutters at the impossible pain of it all. He opens his mouth and closes it again, swallowing audibly as he tries to blink away the sudden, sharp prickling of tears.
In his arms, Kaeya chuckles humorlessly. "Please don't—don't say anything," he says, and his voice has gone so soft that Diluc can barely hear it even over the stillness of the world around them. "Just—hold me?"
Kaeya curls himself tighter against Diluc's body before he could answer, his head lolled to the side.
He doesn't answer Diluc's desperate calls; doesn't move when the first drops of Diluc's tears fall on his pale, bloodless cheeks.
He doesn't wake for the longest time.
Diluc cannot recall how he managed to get them both to the camp at the foot of the mountain, only that he did.
It is only after someone drapes a woolen blanket over him that he realizes how cold he is, his fingers numb and his breathing harsh. He doesn't resist when someone tips his head back and pour something he distantly recognizes as a warming potion down his throat—for a moment he allows himself the comfort of its warmth spreading through his chest, until the alertness it returns with sends a violent chill down his spine.
"Kaeya—" he chokes out, fixing his gaze on the healer in front of him. Is he okay, he wants to ask, but the words evaporate on the tip of his tongue.
The healer—an elderly nun with a stern face and hawkish eyes—visibly softens at the palpable worry in Diluc's voice. "Sir Kaeya," she says, almost gently, "is stable, for the time being. And asleep."
Something at the base of Diluc's spine unwinds its tight knot, ever so slightly, but that alone is not enough. Words alone are not enough—Diluc knows this from experience. "Let me see him."
"Master Diluc," the nun starts, takes one look at the grim determination in Diluc's eyes, and sighs. "Do not attempt to wake him," she says in the end, waiting for Diluc to nod before she leads them across the encampment, where a small tent emblazoned with the Church's logo is erected.
"Thank you," is all Diluc could say to her, in return. Her mouth twitches in a semblance of a smile before she turns around, muttering something about reckless behavior and youths these days.
When Diluc enters the tent, he expects to see Kaeya's prone form lying on the makeshift bed in the center of it. He doesn't expect to be greeted by Kaeya's glacial eye and a lopsided, mirthless smile, his shoulders drawn sharply back. He still looks a little too pale, his lips still a touch too blue, but the look in his eye is that of an animal wounded and backed into a corner, ready for a fight.
"Master Diluc," he drawls, stiff and formal. "Can I help you?"
The snowstorm has demolished the walls Kaeya builds around himself; the cold has exposed the bare vulnerability running under the neatly stitched seams of his dark skin. But one look at Diluc and he is trying to stitch himself back together again into the invulnerable veneer he used to wear like a second skin; one look at Diluc and he is building that wall back, brick and brick, until nothing can touch him.
Diluc is not going to let it happen. Not anymore.
"Kae," he says, and watches as Kaeya's eye widen at the nickname for a split second before it narrows in pointed suspicion. "Can we—talk?"
It is a reversal of roles: Kaeya, hurt and guarded, watching carefully as Diluc begs to be let in.
"There is nothing to talk about," Kaeya says. His spine is rigid as the blade of a longsword, as if it takes all of his willpower to keep himself together. "I'm sure both of us would be happier if we drop the sub—"
"No," Diluc cuts him off. "We need to talk."
Kaeya turns his face away from Diluc, his hands fisted tightly on the starched whiteness of the blanket covering the lower half of his body. "And if I refuse?"
Diluc kisses him, then.
It feels like the easiest thing he has ever done, this gentle brush of his lips against Kaeya's. He rests his hands softly on Kaeya's shoulders, running his fingers through the plane of it until they rest on his nape—an act of gentle unraveling, of unspoken intimacy that lasts for the briefest of moments before Diluc pulls himself back to look at Kaeya in the eye once again.
"Diluc—" Kaeya's face is flushed, beautifully so. Diluc wants to kiss him again, and again, and again—a hundred times over, until he can trace the exact shape of Kaeya's lips even in the darkest of nights.
"That was my answer," Diluc says simply. "To your apologies. To everything."
There is a distinct wetness in Kaeya's laughter as he reaches out to touch Diluc's cheek, his long fingers still colder than they should be. "How unfair, Diluc," he says, voice soft.
"You refused to hear me speak," Diluc replies.
"I did," Kaeya nods, and kisses him in return.
His fingers entangle themselves in Diluc's hair as he deepens the kiss, pulling Diluc impossibly closer; Kaeya kisses him as if he is trying to inhale everything that Diluc is, and he knows that this, too, is an unraveling—of their past, of everything they have refused to say out loud for so long.
They are both panting slightly when they break apart. Diluc can feel the way his face seems to heat up all the way to the tips of his ears; Kaeya's lips, having lost its sickly pallor, now looks kiss-reddened.
"Was that an answer or a question?" Diluc asks.
Warmth has found its way back to Kaeya's smile when he replies, "Both."
Diluc cannot tell who initiates their kiss, this time around—only that Kaeya feels heavenly under him, only that he wants it to continue forever. The merciless wind of the merciless mountain has buried their old wounds in its all-encompassing whiteness, turning it into a landscape made anew—an untold fable about holding on, written in every line of their body.
Dragonspine is how they both learn about love.